Andrew Osborne
MOSCOW (Reuters) – When President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, some Russian hard-liners were cautiously optimistic that his unpredictability and transactional nature might benefit Moscow on Ukraine.
But his attacks on Iran mean many now see him as a growing threat to Russia itself and question whether Trump is a pragmatic, potentially pro-Moscow strongman ready to deal with what they see as realpolitik issues.
Some hawks have publicly called on Moscow to abandon U.S.-brokered peace talks with Ukraine and instead step up efforts to fight there, arguing that the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks that preceded the U.S.-Israeli air war were a cynical tactic that showed Washington cannot be trusted.
“An unprincipled America is a threat to the entire world,” said nationalist tycoon Konstantin Malofeev, who is married to a senior Kremlin official. “We are trying to negotiate with the United States on Ukraine. Yes, it wants a weak Europe. But it also wants a weak Russia.”
Boris Rozhin, an influential war blogger known as “Colonel Kassad” with nearly 800,000 followers on the Telegram app, said Trump was a monster driven mad by impunity.
“To rely seriously on any agreement or deal with it (the monster) is either folly or treason,” Rozin opined.
Prominent academic Andrei Sidorov went further, telling state television that Trump was “a dangerous man” and that he regretted that the US president survived an assassination attempt in July 2024 and was re-elected later that year.
“Now we understand who is in charge of the world,” Sidorov said. “If you look at what Trump is doing now, step by step, almost no one can stop him. Let’s be honest – Russia is in trouble in Ukraine. Really all we are doing now is dealing with Ukraine. (And) our main adversary (the United States) is acting as the middleman in these negotiations.”
The Kremlin remains hopeful that Trump can help end the war in Ukraine on its own terms and oversee a broader, more lucrative rapprochement between the United States and Russia, denouncing U.S. actions as “unprovoked aggression.” But it avoided personal criticism of Trump and offered no tangible material help to Iran beyond diplomatic support.
It also said it believed it was in its own interest to continue peace talks on Ukraine – even if events in Iran meant uncertainty about the timing and location of the next round of talks.
The Kremlin’s statements on Ukraine are a signal that, for now at least, it will continue to work on that delicate balance of maintaining a good enough relationship with Trump to keep him engaged on Ukraine while also calling out policies with which it disagrees.
Russian and Western analysts believe Moscow cannot offer Tehran much help at this stage because it has already imported, improved and begun manufacturing its own Iranian-designed drones.
Some also see the Iran incident as a potential silver lining for Russia. Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev raised the possibility that rising oil prices – which have not yet reached levels Moscow needs to balance its budget – could help ease the strained state budget, while the discounts at which Russia sells oil to countries such as China and India could fall.
Some Russian analysts said that if the conflict in the Middle East continues for a period of time, Ukraine may receive fewer U.S. weapons and ammunition supplies and instead send anti-aircraft missiles to Gulf countries, and the United States’ overall attention and support will also decrease.
However, the harsh rhetoric from the hawks does reflect a real unease in Russia’s security and political establishment. They see an increasingly aggressive U.S. president undermining Moscow’s influence on the world stage at a time when Russia is hamstrung in Ukraine and unable to protect its interests the way the Soviet Union could.
Hawks say Trump is systematically eliminating Russia’s allies. They pointed to the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who was overthrown by opposition forces in December 2024 and whose leader was later feted by Trump at the White House; Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who was arrested at gunpoint by U.S. forces in January; and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated in a joint U.S.-Israeli attack over the weekend.
From the perspective of Washington, the fate of Cuba, a long-time ally, is also worrying.
Trump’s critics accuse him of being too soft on Moscow and making the mistake of letting Putin out of the cold at last year’s Alaska summit, but some Russia hardliners are so alarmed by Trump’s expulsion of a key Moscow ally that they fear Trump might one day turn his attention to Russia, something he has never said is on his agenda.
“If Iran persists, everything could go in the opposite direction. If it collapses, we are next,” ultra-nationalist philosopher and hard-line thinker Alexander Dugin told his followers. He once viewed Trump as Russia’s great hope.
“We had common ground when Trump stayed true to the original ‘Make MAGA’ ideology. As Trump quickly moved away from ‘MAGA’ and toward the neoconservatives, those touchpoints quickly disappeared. It would have been better to have nothing to do with Trump as it is today,” Dugin said.
(Reporting by Andrew Osborne; Editing by Jon Boyle)
